To fix this, you can manually specify the angle that the label appears at with respect to the control circle. I haven’t yet built this in to the online map builder, partly because I didn’t want to clutter the UI with too many options, partly because I haven’t got around to it, and partly because the variables that allow labels to be positioned as such is not yet in the released version of OpenLayers (it is in the trunk) that the map builder is based on, so I’ve had to patch my version specially – I’m reluctant to do too much coding in this area before it’s formally released.

…anyway, to fix it, first produce your map as normal. Then, notice the faint horizontal black line on the bottom left of the PDF? This is actually text which represents a partial URL that allows the map to be recreated. Zoom in to the bottom left in your PDF reader, and copy the line of text into a text editor.

The next step is to edit the label angles. Find the section starting “controls=“. Everything beyond this is a control, each control is defined as four numbers, each seperated by a comma (and no spaces). A comma is also used to separate each control. e.g. controls=1a,1b,1c,1d,2a,2b,2c,2d – where 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d are the four attributes for control 1, etc. The attributes are control number, label angle (clockwise from north), latitude and longitude. The lat/lon coordinates look funny – they use the “EPSG900913″ Google-style coordinates. The label angle is the one to change – they all default to 45 (top right), changing this to, for example, 180, will set the label to be directly below the circle.

Once this is done, copy the long line of text and append it to the URL http://tiler1.censusprofiler.org/pdf? in your web browser. Press enter and you should get back a new PDF with the corrected angles, as seen in the second image below. (N.B. the URL may change in the future, I’m piggy-backing off one of my work project websites at the moment for this.)

Before

After

OpenOrienteeringMap now updates in near-real-time from the OpenOrienteeringMap database. It does what’s called “minutely” updates, although the actual time-lag from updating something in OpenStreetMap (say, using Potlatch), to it appearing in OpenOrienteeringMap, is typically around five minutes – occasionally the delay may be up to 15 minutes, or the update doesn’t appear at all if something wrong happens. This is, however, a vast improvement on the per-month updating I was doing before – that process took a couple of days to run, this only takes a few seconds each minute.

Note if you are viewing OOM in your browser, your browser will probably cache the tiles, including ones which have since been updated, so you will want to do a “super-refresh” of the page (Control+Shift+R) or reopen your web browser, if you’ve made changes and want to see them reflected. Creating PDF maps always uses the database so doesn’t suffer from this caching issue.

A huge amount of adding and updating is going on around the world in OpenStreetMap – the project is growing by around 5% a week – so it’s good to be able to take advantage of people’s efforts on a timely basis.

OpenOrienteeringMap now has a map builder, that will create a PDF map of any area, optionally with score-course orienteering controls on it, for you to print out and run on. You choose the scale, orientation and style – street-O, pseud-O or a special street-O without railway lines. Adornments such as a title, north arrow, logo and attribution are added.

To use it, click on the “Create a Map” link. The builder (which is written in Javascript) doesn’t exactly match the final map 100% as it is just building up a URL that gets sent to another service, powered by Python, Mapnik and Cairo which actually creates the PDF map for printing – the latter is a high-quality vector map so should look great when printed out – no jaggies, except for point-features as Mapnik trunk doesn’t (yet) support SVG icons.

Tip: The URL used to create the map is reproduced in tiny-text on the bottom left of the map – it will look like a small black line until you zoom in to 1600% or so. Copy this text and add it to the end of “http://tiler1.censusprofiler.org/pdf?” to reproduce the map. You can tweak the size (in metres) of the PDF sheet, to accommodate unusual sheet sizes, and also change the title and control positions here rather than having to recreate the whole map in the builder.

I’m going to be documenting how the PDF map is produced, on my research blog, in the next few weeks.

One day last February, I stepped out of work and onto a sleeper train up to the Scottish Highlands with a friend, did a day’s hillwalking from Corrour, an outstandingly remote place, then got the evening train down and the sleeper back to London, rolling back into the office at an unusually early (for me) hour.

Last month I did the same thing again, this time with Dan and James. This time we got really lucky with the weather, so I decided on an ambitious (for winter) trek over two Munros to the south of Tulloch. We had just six hours between the morning train arriving and the evening train leaving, so we kept up a good pace. The snow depth wasn’t as bad as expected, with a 10-15cm layer of hoar frost sitting on top of some well-packed snow. Towards the end of the day we saw a front creeping towards us, that was to give a very heavy snowfall and avalanches in the area the following day.

Finding a good, straight path, we took a direct route up the ever-steepening slopes to the first summit (very boggy and nasty in summer apparently), then a pleasant and fast ridge-walk to the second Munro (again rough in summer) and finally a steep descent back down to the Narnia-like forest – the track being overgrown with trees bent double under the weight of the snow – and back to the station.

The area was a bit sparse on OpenStreetMap but I’ve gone back over the area and traced in the details, with the help of my GPS log, Landsat imagery and Scottish Popular Edition mapping that is now available in Potlatch (more on that soon).

A grand day out.

Route – for the full 3D experience you need the Google Earth browser plugin.

Making lists of orienteering maps seem to be popular at the moment. Following the CompassSport 99 which featured a map in each of the UK’s ceremonial counties, and the Attackpoint 51 which does the same for US states, a project has launched to build a list of the top 101 unmissable orienteering maps around the world. It’s a collaboration between Jan Kocbach of WorldOfO and Ivan Nagy of OO.Cup. They are planning on making it into a book – If this comes to fruition as a coffee-table book of amazing photographs and maps (and I know Ivan takes good photos, the OO.Cup pages always look great!) then it looks like I already know what I’ll be getting people for Christmas.

I’m not sure if the emphasis will be on the best areas technically (and toughest physically), the areas that are most enjoyable to run in, or are in the most spectacular situations – the three types are subtly different, and the very best maps probably need to fufill at least two of these three criteria.

In terms of best technical areas that I’ve run on, The Trossachs in Scotland has got to be up there, along with most areas in Sweden I’ve run in – particularly Lunsen near Uppsala which was the venue of the Varsity Match in 2008. The most enjoyable race I’ve run in is probably Venice, and running around and through the Cite de Carcassonne in the south of France was pretty spectacular. Some of the urban events that are currently popular in the UK would rate quite highly as spectacular, I think, including Oxford in 2006, and my own City of London Race – particularly if we do have it on both sides of the River Thames in 2010.

An area that fulfils all three of the criteria without doubt though is Trockener Steg, which was Day 3 of the Swiss O Week in Zermatt in 2006. In fact, the whole week was superb, but this was my favourite map of all, particularly the running on the amazingly complex, recently glaciated rocks. The views to the Matterhorn were stunning, the orienteering was fiendishly complex and it was great fun.

(Article updated to clarify the project organisers, and add some nice photos.)

[Update - I believe this may be the work of the legendary OCCO President and true recreational orienteer, The Boy Nailest.]

1. Measure the angle that the building is at, on your basemap:

2. Open up Preferences and go to the General tab. Enter the measured angle in the “Constrain Angle” box:

3. Draw the vertices of the building. Holding down Shift will now constrain subsequent vertices to the constrain angle (and +/- 45 degrees and 90 degrees from it) rather than to the horizontal and vertical of your screen.

4. Using Smart Guides in conjunction with setting the constrain angle will help line up parallel features, allowing buildings to be drawn quickly and accurately. A quirk of switching on Smart Guides, is that you will normally then need to click to reselect any existing node, vertex or partially-drawn building.

Smart Guides are very useful, but can be annoying when drawing very complex buildings with shallow or unusual angles – I typically switch them on or off repeatedly when tracing such buildings, and memorise and jump between two or more constrain angles for different “wings” of the building.

The background imagery used in this example, by the way, is recently released imagery showing the extent of the earthquake damage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The OpenStreetMap community is working to quickly complete a map of the city to aid the rescue effort.

January

The year started with a training score exercise in Aird’s Park, near Oban, on New Year’s Day. “Park” is a highly misleading name for the area, it was extremely physical with tussocks and marshes everywhere. Managed to finish second, but only because most of the good people misjudged the time back to the start and got penalties. I was up in the Scottish Highlands on the annual JOK New Year hillwalking trip, so the following day it was back to the Munros – and what a day. The four eastern Mamores climbed in cold and crisp conditions, finishing well after dark.

The only other orienteering in January was two London street-Os – an LOK race in Hampstead and a SLOW race in Wimbledon. They were very hilly, and I got a late penalty at both. And also a weekend of city races – on the Saturday the second Edinburgh Street Race which I enjoyed even more than the first, especially as I didn’t get disqualified this time – and then on the Sunday, having travelled right back to London, it was up again to Lincoln for their own City Race, again the second time I have run it. Again, a great race, and even better than the one before. This time, we got to run right through Lincoln Castle – up the drawbridge, across the battlements and out through the gate. A race with a definite “wow” factor.

February

In February I was quite preoccupied with planning for the JOK Chasing Sprint, which was near Watford. A few chilly weekends were spent surveying the courses. There was also another SLOW street-O, at Kingston, where I again got a late penalty!

Also, I got back up in the Highlands, for one day only. Sleeper to Glasgow, early morning train up, six damp hours in the hills around Loch Ossian (some snow, but a big thaw was on) and then back on the train overnight to London. I’m doing it all again next month.

Finally, I got to use my mountain bike on “proper” terrain as opposed to the streets of London – a two hour lap of the “Red trail” singletrack at Bedgebury Forest in Kent – a warm-up for a weekend singletracking in Wales. My cheapo-MTB held up just fine, which was more than could be said for Chris’s hire bike.

March

The first terrain orienteering of the year – BUCS in SW London. Oxford was organising it on SLOW areas. I went very wrong indeed at the individual race – probably lack of practice. The relay was a bit better but I was still a bit clueless. At least I was a bit better at the next SLOW street-O two days later, in Surbiton. Didn’t get a late penalty for once.

The next weekend it was time for my first mega-cycle of the year – over 10 hours in the saddle, as I tried (and failed) to get to Eastbourne. My mistake, perhaps, was following the National Cycle Network route (21) strictly, even where it goes off the road to go up a bumpy, muddy track, only to rejoin the road a couple of km later. It did this many times. Some sections were very pleasant, such as the bit around Eridge. But, 140km after leaving Hackney, it had got properly dark, so I cut the trip short.

One week later I was off on the bike again, this time taking the “official” road-cycling route to Brighton. I completed the 100km route in just over 5 hours, + a couple of hours of stops – slightly disappointingly seven minutes longer than last year’s.

I also made a start on mapping the western extension to the City of London orienteering map, with a wander around the old alleys off Fleet Street.

The month finished with a weekend in Wales, on the various MTB singletrack trails in Coed y Brenin in North Wales. Great fun, a lot of trails were done, including the Tawr and most of the Dragon’s Back.

April

The fourth trip in four months to Scotland – on Saturday I ran in the Scottish Sprint Orienteering Champs at Stirling University. Afterwards I went for a walk up to the Wallace Monument – I’d been meaning to have a look around this for years. The following day I ran the Edinburgh Half-Marathon – the sprints having been a less-than-ideal preparation. The second half of my race was a lot slower than the first. I’m doing the full-marathon version this year, and will be preparing better!

A couple of days later, and I had not recovered, but I ran anyway in the final SLOW street-O of the year, in Pimlico. I got around with two seconds to spare, and got my second best result of the series. Tim & CJ’s feast was excellent. Then it was back up to Scotland for Easter, but doing the JK Sprint in Newcastle on the way.

Back in London, I cycled 75km to Cuckfield with Anna, the first of our joint training trips for John O’Groats-London in the summer. It was a busy weekend – on the 19th I ran in the Newham Classic 10K – it was a very local race for me, and cheap to enter, and the route past the Olympic Stadium looked interesting. Then in the afternoon more City of London map surveying, around Lincoln’s Inn – and I had my bike nicked! It had lasted only 18 months, although as it happened I was going to be getting a road bike for the long summer cycles anyway.

Finally, there was the Varsity Match, which was just north of London and later in the year than normal – this year’s is in early March in Cornwall. The individual was in Epping Forest – always an enjoyable area to run on. The course was tough but pleasant, and my race was livened up when I spotted a snake slivering away from one of the controls near the end. It was warm enough to lie around at the finish and eat ice cream – summer was on its way!

• Where trams run on or very near roads, they are now shown as being underneath the road. For the Street-O map, this means they are partially or completely obscured. On the Pseud-O map, a set of square dots shows where the tram goes. This stops the tram line from obscuring the (passable) road.
  
• Hedges are now drawn underneath the road layer, so they no longer obscure passable roads.
  
• Paths and tracks in tunnels (e.g. in shopping centres) are now shown on the Street-O map – previously they only appeared on Pseud-O.

Above: Amsterdam. Below: The Forbidden City.